Don’t get stranded in an airport.

Scott McCartney, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, has instituted a “death watch” of sorts in his latest column, highlighting Alitalia, Frontier, ExpressJet, and SunCountry as airlines in peril. The culprits? The same woes you’ve heard about all year—high fuel prices, costly overhead, and intense competition from rival airlines. If you have a ticket on any of these lines, you may want to consider making alternate arrangements.

“Passenger carriers are no longer required to honor tickets of failed competitors because Congress let a government protection for travelers expire in 2006,” says McCartney. So unlike in previous years, ticketholders on the three failed airlines found themselves having to pay up or be stuck